He was not an unfamiliar guest, but his present temper inclined him to consider more closely the curious inequalities of life – the various modes in which persons, not widely differing in tastes and aspirations, are socially encircled. What a contrast was there between the abounding luxury here heaped up, pressed down and running over, and the homely surroundings of his own home, from which nevertheless the danger of departure had well-nigh driven him mad. The parquet floors, the glittering treasures of the overmantels, the lounges, the dado, the friezes, the rare china, the plaques, the antique and the modern collections, each a study, the cost of which would have gone nigh to buy halt Windāhgil.
When the hostess was informed by the imposing butler that dinner was served, and the guests filed into the dining-room, Mr. Stamford was nearly as much astonished by the magnificence of the repast and the concomitants thereof as if he had for the first time in his life beheld such splendours. In earlier days, now almost forgotten, such repasts had been to him sufficiently familiar. But these latter seasons of drought and despair had wholly, or in great part, excluded all thought of the pomps and vanities of life. So he smiled to himself, as he took the arm of Miss Crewit the passée society damsel to whom, by the fiat of Mrs. Grandison, he had been allotted, to find that his first thought was of startled surprise – his second of the habitudes which came to him as by second nature, and a conviction that he must have witnessed such presentments in a former state of existence.
All was very splendid, beyond denial. What was otherwise was æsthetically rare and almost beyond price. Antique carved furniture, mediæval royal relics, a sideboard which looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus, contrasted effectively with the massiveness of the plate, the glory of the glass, the triumph of the matchless Sèvres dinner-service. In perfect keeping was the quiet assiduity of the attendants, the quality of the iced wines, the perfection and finish of the whole entertainment.
“Rather a contrast to the tea-table at Windāhgil!” Harold Stamford said to himself; “not but what I should have been able to do things like this if I could have held on to those Kilbride blocks for another year. Only another year!” and he sighed involuntarily. “It is very fine in its way, though I should be sorry to have to go through this ordeal every evening. Grandison doesn’t look too happy making conversation with that deaf old dowager on his right. He was brighter looking in the old working-time, when he used to drop in at Din Din, where we had a glass of whisky before bedtime with a smoke and a good talk afterwards. Bob certainly read more or less then. He begins to look puffy too; he doesn’t see much of the library now, I’m afraid, except to snore in it.”
Here his fair neighbour, who had finished her soup and sipped her sherry, began to hint an assertion of social rights.
“Don’t you think dear Josie looks a little pale and thin, though she is exquisitely dressed as usual? But I always say no girls can stand the ceaseless excitement, the wild racketing of a Sydney season. Can they, now?”
“To my eye she looks very nice, pale if you like; but you don’t expect roses and lilies with the thermometer at 80° for half the year, except when it’s at 100°.”
“Well, perhaps you’re right; but it isn’t the climate altogether in her case, I should say. It’s the fearfully exciting life girls of her monde seem to lead nowadays. It’s that which brings on the wrinkles. You notice her face when she turns to the light.”
“Are women worse than they used to be, do you think; or is Josie more dissipated than the rest of her age and sex?” queried Stamford.
“I don’t know that, though they do say that she is the fastest of a very fast set; and between you and me, there have been some rather queer stories about her, not that I believe a word of them. But the girls nowadays do go such awful lengths; they say and do such things, you don’t know what to believe.”
“Ah! well, she’s young and happy, I suppose, and makes the most of her opportunities of enjoyment. My old friend, Bob Grandison, has been lucky, and his family seem to have everything they can possibly want.”
“Everything, indeed, and more besides. (Chablis, if you please!) Then I suppose you knew Mr. Grandison when he was not quite so well off? They say he got into society rather suddenly; but I’m afraid it doesn’t do the young people quite as much good as it might. There’s the eldest son, Carlo, as they call him – he used to be Charlie when I first knew them.”
“Why, what about him? Nothing wrong, is there? He seems a fine lad.”
“Well, nothing wrong yet. Not yet; oh, no! Only he spends half his time at the club, playing billiards from morning till night, and he’s always going about with that horrid gambling Captain Maelstrom. They do say – but you won’t let it go further – that he was one of that party at loo when young Weener lost five thousand pounds, and such a scandal arose out of it.”
“Good heavens! You horrify me! A mere boy like that! It can’t be true; surely not.”
“I heard it on good authority, I assure you, and other stories too, which I can’t repeat – really too shocking to talk about. See how empresse he is with that Mrs. Loreleigh! What men see in that women I really can’t think.”
“My old friend had both sense and right feeling once upon a time,” said Stamford. “He can’t be so weak as to allow all this.”
“He does all he can, poor old gentleman; but Mrs. Grandison is so absurdly vain about Carlo’s good looks, and the fine friends he goes about with, that she can’t see any danger. Lord Edgar Wildgrave and that Sir Harry Falconer who was here last year (you know they do say that Josie broke her heart about Lord Edgar, and that makes her so reckless). But I know his father is very uneasy about him, and well he may be. I’m afraid Ned bids fair to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Thanks – I will take an olive.”
“What a wretched state of things!” groaned Mr. Stamford, almost audibly. “I must hope, for the sake of my friend’s family, that matters may be exaggerated.”
“I wish they are, with all my heart,” said the candid friend. “They always have such delicious fruit here, haven’t they? I must say they do things well at Chatsworth House. I always enjoy a dinner here. I see Mrs. Grandison making a move. Thanks!”
And so Miss Crewitt followed the retreating file of ladies that, headed by Mrs. Grandison’s stately form, quitted the dining-room, leaving Mr. Stamford much disordered with the unpleasant nature of the ideas which he had perforce absorbed with his dinner. He could not forgive his late neighbour for introducing them into his system.
“Confounded, venomous, ungrateful cat!” he said in his righteous wrath. “How she enjoyed every mouthful of her dinner, pouring out malice and all uncharitableness the while! Serves Mrs. Grandison right, all the same. If she’d picked me out a nice girl, or a good motherly dame, I should not have heard all this scandal about her household. But what a frightful pity it seems! I must talk to Grandison about it.”
At this stage Mr. Stamford was aroused by his host’s voice. “Why, Harold, old man, where have you got to? Close up, now the women are gone. Bring your chair next to Carlo.”
He walked up as desired, the other guests having concentrated themselves in position nearer the head of the table, and found himself next to the heir of the house, Mr. Carlo Grandison. That young gentleman, whom he had observed during dinner talking with earnestness to a lady no longer young, but still handsome and interesting, in spite of Miss Crewitt’s acidulated denial of the fact, did not trouble himself to be over agreeable to his father’s old friend.
He devoted himself, however, with considerable assiduity to the decanters as they passed, and drank more wine in half an hour than Mr. Stamford had ever known Hubert to consume in a month.
He